Virgin Media, the bright new name for NTL:Telewest have introduced STM (subscriber traffic managment) on their network, to throttle peak users of their service.
I’m not over the moon about it, but I don’t think it will affect me much.
As a good few regular readers are VM subscribers, what do you all think?
Judging by the amount of transmission breaks in their cable TV it would appear they’ve been operating STM on that for some time.
And seriously, I’ll continue with the same surfing habits and see how it goes. If my LAN* demands are such that it affects me then I will simply find a better service.
* Two teenagers using their computers after school can gobble up the bandwidth 🙁
Well unless you’re a big P2P downloader, VM reckon you ‘re unlikely to hit the STM threshold.
The other thing is: is there a better service? STM just throttles your speed down, lots of ADSL providers actually cap your service: either turning you off, or charging you more.
The thing is, currently I’m finding it slow without STM at peak times- probably due to sheer load.
Their argument is that STM will work in my favour.
Personally, i think they should upgrade the infrastructure, and introduce packet shaping. The problem is, lots of the heavy use applications (P2P, binary newsgroups) have encryption capabilities that can tunnel the traffic inside SSL, hiding it from the shaper, and upgrading the infrastructure costs £££££. This of course, doesn’t mean I don’t think they should try.
I’ve probably experienced the same slowness as you then. Perhaps that’s making me think the kids were causing the slow down and the time it happens is just a coincidence.
A colleague has the kids slowing the connection problem: he is also currently playing with a Cisco router so as to effectively throttle their MSN sessions, leaving him with most of the bandwidth, hence the upgraded IOS and complicated setup. Most consumer grade routers won’t do it, unfortunatley.
There has definitley been congestion or problems on VM broadband of late.
I’ve definately noticed a drop in connection speeds. I’m not a big p2p downloader anymore but do use my fair share of capacity via legal methods (napster, iso downloads, service packs etc.) mainly because the connection at work is only 2mb. Thing is, we had it so good for so long I think we’ve been spoilt. Compare the VM service to a BT ADSL and I think I’ll be staying where I am but grumbling about it to myself….
2MB over some string and a couple of tin cans in Ezzo! ha! ha! I dream of 2 MB over a cable connection. Right now we use TCP/IP over Avian which expains why my car is always covered in cr*p!
And you have to share the pigeons so we get a contended avian service to boot!